Making Games with MEGA!

Howdy everybody! It’s been a busy week with presentations and projects for my classes, but I wanted to share one of my favorite student organizations with you this week: the Makers of Entertaining Games Association (MEGA)!

Last year I posted a spotlight on the Association for Computing Machinery, and so this year I want to share a little bit about my involvement with MEGA. The Makers of Entertaining Games Association, or MEGA, is a game development club on campus. MEGA brings together people who love games and want to help make them. MEGA is open to students of all backgrounds (you don’t even need to be a programmer. You just need to be interested in making games). MEGA hosts a lot of events: game jams, panels, guest speakers series and tutorials. I’ve learned how to use prototyping tools like Game Maker, Twine as well as some of the fundamentals of Photoshop and other tools.

What I love most about MEGA, though, are the game jams. During a game jam a bunch of MEGA members get together and develop a game, based on a theme, in only 48 hours. The theme is a secret up until the jam begins. Once the theme is revealed it’s a free-for-all to form up teams and prototype a game as fully as possible. It’s a huge collaboration of ideas and crazy mash-ups of different types of games that let us developers experiment and produce some of the craziest (and most fun) games that have never before been seen! Check out some pictures from a game jam below:

Once we have a theme, it’s time to build a team!

Form teams and start building!

MEGA is a great way to meet friends in the game design and enthusiast area, and it’s definitely helped encourage me to pursue my Video Game Programming minor. If that sounds like you, definitely come check it out!